COURSE of the MONTH

Why are my USB sticks being wiped out by windows 7?

Hello,
I have a user that has had 2 128gig USB sticks wiped clean on her dell xps 13 running win7 pro sp1 fully updated. Last weekend she called me in a panic telling me the her USB was blanked out...I figured it was hardware failure. Well today she had another 128gig stick wiped out again. USB sticks are now unformatted - user knows how to safely remove them. We do not have policy's in place to prevent using usbs- this user is an admin on her machine.
The USB sticks are microcenter branded 128gig - so could it be possible that they are crap? Or is windows really reformatting them on its own?
Any help would be appreciated.
Michael

I only saw this type of issue when a usb pen drive was formatted on Windows then placed in a Mac and the Mac write a file to the drive. The Pc was unable to read the USB Pen drive again.
This does not happen al the time but it has caused issue I seen.

Windows does not automatically format any drive you are prompted to do so.

You should have had a message when the drive was unreadable what was that?

A common malware trick is to "infect" a USB drive by copying a malicious program onto it, and creating an autorun.inf file that automatically runs the executable when it is plugged into a vulnerable machine.

If you have some malware on the computer which is attempting to do this, but doing a poor job and corrupting the filesystem of the USB stick in the process... that would also explain it.

It'd be a pretty rare thing to see, so I wouldn't spend too much time investigating down this path, but maybe a quick look at the computer with Sysinternals Autoruns or Hijackthis for anything suspicious looking would be prudent.

Hello Everyone...Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. Firstly I'd like to thank you all for your input on this problem. The end user told me that only one of the two usb sticks went to the grave. Ended up sending the bad/dead one off to a data recover specialist who advised me that the USB on board software was corrupt. He was able to extract 99% 50gigs of data off the useless stick - We both agreed that the stick was low quality and the 128gig stick are just not ready for daily use yet.